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We might be looking at Fighting Game of the Year here. A couple minor glitches aside, UFC has the markings of a true winner. Right off of E3, I swore I'd give UFC a perfect 5 GiN Gem rating because of how I was blown away with it. I'm still keeping my word, because UFC did what many other games failed to do, deliver through all the hype. In fact, once again this is one of those select few titles that should get a 6 GiN Gem rating, but our reviews limit it to just 5. Oh well. Crave, consider the 6th GiN Gem on me!

UFC is good game. But just like so many games I've played, none of them have good single-player modes. Of the ones I've touched none have a deep, involving tournament. But, Ultimate Fighting Championship is great with two players. There are plenty of folks out there who love punching and kicking repetitively, round after round, but I like a little color splashed into otherwise monotonous gameplay. Like I said before, this game definitely rocks with a friend.

Here's a nice change of pace. For the first time I can think of, a game was made for Dreamcast, then downgraded to run on PlayStation. I can see why this hasn't been done before. Every facet of the game had to be taken down a serious notch. The most unkind alteration of them all is the animation. The smooth graphics that allowed for a festival of strategic countering have been reduced to a chop-fest that makes pulling off the move you intend more difficult than necessary. Anyone who's played the Dreamcast version of UFC will laugh their asses off at this PlayStation attempt, but the basic engine still makes for one of the more interesting, and challenging, fighters released this year.

Even with these extras, Ultimate Fighting Championship is a sloppy port of a successful Dreamcast fighter. While its slower-paced and longer-lasting matches provide a feeling of uniqueness, it seems Opus and Crave Entertainment forgot to bring home the tight gameplay, awesome visuals, and the killer audio that marked the original game. What remains from this translation provides a strictly mediocre gaming experience that fails to excite.

Words almost fail us, but describing the general response to UFC’s ‘action’ – fifteen minutes of tear streaming laughter – should convey some idea of how comedically awful the game is. As long as you haven’t paid to see the show of course – although even witnessing UFC feels like some kind of tax in itself.

There are more problems: poor graphics, stiff control, cheesy designs, but UFC does have one positive feature: a very open-ended Create A Fighter mode. Nevertheless, as fun as the Create A Fighter mode can be, it doesn't even come close to solving the major problems with this game.